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Chapter 5
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Sum of Us, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Zero-Sum Thinking vs. Solidarity
The Toll of Racism
American Values and Identity
Research, Persuasion, and Policy Change
Summary
Analysis
The U.S.’s political system is even more unequal and unjust than its economy, and this has serious consequences. In 2017, Demos helped defend the white veteran Larry Harmon, who was about to lose his right to vote. A faith in democracy is one of the cornerstones of American society, but the country has never truly been democratic: it has always excluded people of color from participating as equals. And this exclusion only benefits the “narrow white elite.”
The U.S.’s voting system demonstrates that there is a significant gap between the nation’s stated values—like justice, democracy, and equality—and its actual history and policy. McGhee also emphasizes that readers must understand the Republican Party’s new voting restrictions through the lens of U.S. history. After all, similar restrictions have always prevented most Black people from voting, and in the South, they allowed white supremacist governments to rule for centuries.
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Political science research finds that Republicans who worry about white people losing power and status tend to support authoritarian solutions to maintaining that power. Of course, the U.S. government was originally created for “minority rule […] by only the wealthiest of white men.” Non-property owners couldn’t vote, while the Three-fifths Compromise and the Electoral College were designed to tilt power towards slave states. In the 21st century, the Electoral College still tilts elections towards whiter states, which has enabled both George W. Bush and Donald Trump to win the presidency despite receiving a minority of the votes.
It’s important to distinguish between the feel-good myth that the U.S. was designed as a perfect democracy and the more troubling reality: at its founding, the U.S. was more democratic than other nations because it was designed to be an aristocracy, and most of its peer countries were either subjugated colonies or absolute monarchies. A few chapters ago, McGhee observed that, when white male policymakers talk about whether policies benefit “the economy,” they are really talking about whether these policies benefit rich white men like themselves. The situation is similar with “democracy”—when many Republicans talk about “democracy,” they really mean the nation's original system of “minority rule [...] by only the wealthiest of white men.”
Themes
Zero-sum thinking led the U.S. to remove the property requirement for voting. Southern states gave working-class white men voting rights in order to prevent interracial rebellions, and northern ones extended the vote to all white men (including immigrants) while simultaneously revoking them from the Black property-owning men who had been able to vote.
Once again, McGhee highlights how zero-sum thinking has driven policy throughout history in order to give her readers insight into how policymakers are still using the same tactics today. Perhaps more than any other issue, voting rights were quite literally zero-sum: by giving poor white people the vote, elites bought their loyalty and made it clear that the government considered them distinct from (and superior to) Black people.
Themes
After the Civil War, John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln specifically because he was outraged about Black people becoming citizens, and white mobs murdered hundreds of Black people for exercising their voting rights. In the South, white supremacist state governments invented new strategies to prevent Black people from voting. For instance, some states charged poll taxes, which drastically reduced turnout among poor people of all races. Voter registration and felon disenfranchisement laws were also invented to limit Black voting—which they still do today. (But they disenfranchise many white people, too).
Many Americans know about Lincoln’s assassination and Jim Crow-era voting restrictions in the South, but they generally view them as exceptions to the rule of American democracy. In reality, though, this rule has never existed: both the assassination and Jim Crow were part of the same long, zero-sum tradition of policies restricting power and representation to white people. Of course, like all racist policies, these voting restrictions primarily targeted people of color, but they also hurt countless white people. And McGhee’s analysis in the rest of this chapter will show how this antidemocratic effort is still ongoing today.
Themes
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Florida reversed its felon disenfranchisement laws in 2018 thanks to a ballot initiative presented by the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC) and Demos. Notably, the FRRC always sent white and Black activists together to knock on doors around Florida, in order to fight racist stereotypes about felons. But after the ballot initiative passed, the Florida state government kept felons disenfranchised by requiring them to prove that they paid off all of their fines before voting, while refusing to track how much they owe or whether they have actually paid.
The FRRC’s activism once again shows that it’s more effective for progressives to proactively address racism and advocate for racial solidarity than to avoid the topic of race altogether in the hopes of not rocking the boat. But in response to the ballot initiative, the state government decided to avoid implementing the people’s will based on a technicality. This shows that conservatives who recognize that their power depends on minority rule will often fight to stop the advance of democracy by any means necessary.
Themes
If most of our politicians are only elected by a minority of citizens, McGhee asks, what does that say about American democracy? Other countries do far better: whereas only 70 percent of Americans are registered to vote, more than 90 percent of Australians, Canadians, and Germans are. The U.S.’s voting laws are extremely complicated, outdated, and inconsistent from state to state. In fact, most Americans lack even basic knowledge about their state laws. Unsurprisingly, the easiest states to vote in are also the whitest—like Oregon, which has automatic voter registration, and North Dakota, which doesn’t require registration at all. And today, as in the Jim Crow era, voter suppression is most common in states with high Black populations, like Mississippi.
Contrary to the myth that the U.S. has an exceptional democracy, the U.S.’s political system is actually far less democratic than most of its peers’. This is deliberate, McGhee argues: elites have designed the laws to continue preventing people of color and poor white people from fully participating in politics. This turns voting into a zero-sum game: by preventing other groups from voting, affluent white people expand their own political power. While the situation is no longer as egregious as it was during the Jim Crow era, it’s also misleading to think that the basic elements of Jim Crow have completely disappeared.
Themes
But since Obama’s election, billionaire-funded right-wing activists have also started passing voter suppression laws in swing states like Florida, Ohio, and North Carolina. The 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision overturned part of the Voting Rights Act, ending the federal government’s power to oversee election law in states with a history of racial discrimination. After this decision, roughly half the states immediately passed discriminatory laws. For instance, Texas and North Carolina began accepting the kinds of ID that white people have (like gun licenses) while rejecting those mostly held by people of color (like college IDs). Alabama started requiring a driver’s license to vote—and then closing down DMVs in Black areas.
McGhee’s brief history of voter suppression shows her readers why developments like the ones she describes here are so dangerous. Just like during the Jim Crow era, the wealthy are trying to amass more wealth and power for themselves by funding a massive effort to exclude people of color from the U.S. political system. Just like Jim Crow-era poll taxes and literacy tests, voter ID laws are designed to look race-neutral in theory, while in practice, they specifically target people of color. And if they succeed, then the nation could get stuck in a cycle of permanent white minority rule—much like the South was during the Jim Crow era.
Themes
These voter suppression policies target people of color, but they have also affected plenty of white people. For instance, a majority of the registered Alabama voters who lacked the proper ID were white, and married white women lost the vote in large numbers after changing their names. One Black Texas man couldn’t vote in 2016 because his mother changed his name upon remarrying in 1964; another, who is blind, couldn’t vote because the government misspelled his name on a copy of his birth certificate.
Voter suppression follows the same pattern that McGhee has identified over and over: it’s specifically designed to hurt people of color, but it ends up hurting everybody (except wealthy white people). And these examples show how stricter voting laws make elections more favorable to conservatives, regardless of what those laws actually require. This is simply because wealthier, whiter people—who tend to be conservative—have more resources and can more easily overcome barriers to voting.
Themes
Worse still, officials in states like Ohio have de-registered hundreds of thousands of voters in largely nonwhite, Democratic counties. If someone didn’t vote, the state sent them a postcard, and if they didn’t return the postcard—which most people didn’t—the state purged their name from voter rolls. Most of those affected didn’t realize it until election day, when it was already too late. Demos teamed up with a trade union and the deregistered veteran Larry Harmon to sue the government. When the case went to the Supreme Court in 2018, Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out that the law was obviously discriminatory, but the conservative majority upheld it anyway.
Like Alabama, North Carolina, and Texas’s ID laws, Ohio’s voter purges were specifically designed to target demographics who are likely to vote Democratic (like people without permanent addresses, or young people, who move often). And the Supreme Court’s majority opinion suggests that it is willing to accept discriminatory laws, so long as the officials who write them can describe them in a way that sounds non-discriminatory. In other words, the Supreme Court has sent a clear message that lawmakers’ declared intentions matter more than their laws’ actual effects.
Themes
A group of far-right billionaires and millionaires, led by oil magnates Charles and David Koch, funded the think tanks that drafted voter suppression laws for states like Ohio. After stumbling upon the right-wing economist James M. Buchanan’s papers, historian Nancy MacLean wrote the book Democracy in Chains, which details how the Koch brothers’ network has tried to reshape the Republican Party. In short, their goal is to eliminate representative democracy in the U.S. so that corporations can rule without regulation or oversight. They have funded think tanks, lawsuits like Shelby County v. Holder, and even new gerrymandering technology.
Many Americans view the current right-wing anti-government movement as a form of grassroots activism. But in reality, it’s a top-down effort to undermine democracy that has been designed and funded by the ultrawealthy. In fact, McGhee sees it as a new version of Reagan’s attempt to enrich the private sector by defunding and dismantling the government. (Policy researchers and social scientists frequently call this policy approach “neoliberalism.”)
Themes
The Koch network’s goal is “property supremacy”—rule by and for those with property. But white supremacy helps them get there. Even in the 1950s, James M. Buchanan was advising Virginia about how to maintain school segregation. Today, the Koch network uses racism to win support for its unpopular policy goals: reducing taxes for the wealthy and privatizing everything from healthcare to infrastructure.
The Koch network’s influence gives important context to many of the policy issues that McGhee covered in earlier chapters. Namely, the conservative campaigns against universal healthcare, public education, consumer debt protection, and unions, among others, are all part of the broader elite movement for “property supremacy.” And this goal is not new—rather, it amounts to turning the clock back to the nation’s founding, when property-owning white men held all the political power.
Themes
Perhaps most importantly, racism helps the Koch network restrict the vote. Network-funded ads juxtapose lies about voter fraud with images of Black and brown people, which has convinced many white Americans “that brown and Black people could be committing a crime by voting.” In turn, they have begun supporting laws that restrict voting and undermine democracy (which they see as an obstacle to their own “economic liberty”). And these laws aren’t just directed at people of color: they also increasingly target young white voters, who tend to be liberal. For instance, North Carolina has made it harder for students to register to vote and moved polling places away from college campuses.
Just like Reagan’s war on drugs and the Nissan factory’s anti-union campaign, these Koch network ads let racist stereotypes and the zero-sum mindset do the heavy lifting. Specifically, they encourage white people to take the side of the ultrawealthy by associating the other side with people of color. For instance, if billionaires want voting restrictions, then suddenly, people of color voting is fraud; if billionaires want to privatize the school system, then suddenly, public schools are a plot to redistribute resources to people of color.
Themes
In 1956, Henry Frye failed the literacy test to vote in North Carolina: name everyone who signed the Declaration of Independence. His experience was typical of the Jim Crow South, where voter suppression laws stopped virtually all Black people from voting. But the Voting Rights Act of 1965 changed this, enabling most Black Southerners to vote. (After it, Henry Frye finally voted; later, he ran for office and even became the state supreme court’s chief justice.)
North Carolina’s literacy test was clearly designed to be impossible to pass—and it worked. Henry Frye’s story shows how dramatically voting rights transformed every aspect of life for people of color in the American South. In turn, McGhee is warning her readers that, if the current conservative effort to roll back voting rights succeeds, then people of color could face the same kind of restrictions and disempowerment in the future.
Themes
Voter suppression is based on the zero-sum idea that white people win if Black people lose, but in the South, it often ensnared poor white people, too. In addition to finally giving Black people meaningful political power in the South, the Voting Rights Act also gave poor white people more bargaining power. Candidates could no longer win on the basis of white supremacy alone, so they started promising to improve people’s lives and investing in public goods like education and infrastructure.
Once again, policies designed to empower people of color ended up empowering poor white people, too—even if they failed to recognize it. This is significant because the zero-sum story is particularly easy to believe when it comes to voting: more representation for Black people seems like it would obviously reduce representation for white people. Yet during the Jim Crow era, poor white people were never truly represented because politicians never actually focused on their interests. And the Voting Rights Act changed this. So just like raising the minimum wage also raises wages for workers who make slightly more than the minimum wage, better representation for Black Southerners also helped poor white Southerners.
Themes
Besides voter suppression, the right-wing anti-democracy movement’s other main focus is removing the limits on money in politics. It has succeeded: the famous Citizens United decision allows corporations and dark-money groups to spend as much as they want on campaigns. Political science research shows that these corporate donors strongly influence policy outcomes, while ordinary citizens’ preferences do not. In this sense, the U.S. does not truly have majority rule. Just 1.2 percent of Americans contribute 71 percent of political funding, and according to a New York Times exposé, these donors are “overwhelmingly white, rich, older and male.”
Megadonors expanded their own power by funding the Citizens United case. This decision has left the country even less democratic—and made every progressive policy goal even harder to achieve. The research that McGhee cites, which concludes that the U.S. is already not democratic, underlines how serious the situation has become. It also raises the question of whether conservative policymakers would stop at eliminating people of color’s voting rights, or turn their tactics against white voters, too. After all, many conservative white Americans don’t realize that they’re voting for a system ruled by the rich, not merely one ruled by white people.
Themes
Connecticut’s experience with campaign finance reform shows how the entire U.S. could benefit from new policies. After several major corruption scandals, the state started a “Citizens’ Election Program”—it began giving public money to candidates who could demonstrate significant grassroots support. Suddenly, instead of courting wealthy donors, candidates focused on meeting with the public. Ordinary people could afford to run for office, and the state legislature became far more diverse. It passed policies like new labor protections and an increased minimum wage, which show that true representative democracy yields a Solidarity Dividend. Many have proposed creating a nationwide version of this program.
Connecticut shows that election reform is a key first step to achieving a broader progressive agenda. It also demonstrates that fixing the broken election system is neither complicated nor impractical—it just requires significant political will. And such a fix would make the entire system more democratic because it would force candidates to build their policy agendas around the public’s actual needs, instead of donors’ whims. This would help the U.S. live up to its democratic ideals far better than ever before.
Themes
The U.S.’s representative democracy has always been sorely lacking, but it has also incorporated new groups of people over time. Nancy MacLean tells McGhee that she is optimistic about the U.S. because she sees people of all races coming together to heal their democracy.
McGhee reminds her readers that, even though the U.S. hasn't lived up to its democratic, egalitarian values in the past, these values can still serve as valuable ideals for its future. Indeed, her life’s work is to make them come true—but understanding the failures of the past is the first step to doing so.
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